Book World Central

You can stand on a street corner with a table and use a sidekick as a look out for police or be smart and get Internet savvy.

After doing a lot of research and assessment which included getting feedback from end users readers and interviewing various marketing and branding whizkids across the globe we came to a conclusion that in today’s scenario web turns out to be the best bet for promoting our products and services and books are no different.

If you are an author or a book marketer please read on because what you are going to read in the following lines will change the way you look at your customers readers and potential clients.

• 1. Be Online live online write online and read online till you become a true online netizen.

• 2. A website with a Content Management System (CMS) that helps you make blog posts, send posts out via RSS, and makes editing easy.

• 3. An ecommerce “shopping cart” system at your website so you can take orders for your book. This cold be a stand-alone system you implement on your own site, or it could tie into your P.O.D. publishers’ system (see #3).

• 4. Use a good P.O.D. book publishing company (Print On Demand) that offers you distribution services, promotion in their own online catalog of books, and order taking and processing (which you can then plug into your own website as mentioned in #2. Check out Lulu.com (link below).

• 5. Public relations — professionally done. This means going beyond a professionally written News Release to actual press contacts and follow-ups. You need to do this both for your book, and your publishing company.

• 6. You and your wife should hang out online at websites where fiction fans congregate and become “known” on bulletin boards, where your postings will always include a link back to a web page where people can purchase your book… in the signature line. Careful here — you can get thrown off boards for spamming directly in the body text of your post. Instead, write on topic posts, but include the link to your book in the signature line under your name.

• Some quick tips are here:
  1) Ebook
  2) Free bonuses when someone orders the book on amazon lets say
  3) Give seminars and then after the seminar, mention that the book details whatever was discussed.
  4) Send the book to some reputed authors in the same field and ask them if they could recommend it.
  5) promote using blogs

  I think the best person who has done this successfully is Joe Vitale - www.mrfire.com. He sold his new book “Attractor Factor” in phenomenal numbers without hitting book stores.

• There is always Kinko’s and Ebay, or if you are cheap, just ebay and emailing a PDF.

• Send it to Oprah, and if it gets added as Book of the Month or whatever she does, you will have publishers knocking on your door with a brand new solid gold door knocker that they just installed.

• Publish on Demand, as previously mentioned is good.

• You can publish yourself, one of my friends is doing it, it only costs about $6,000, US, which isn’t too bad, then you can sell it however you want, ebay, your own web site, someone elses web site, get some annoying college prof to make it required for his mega freshman class of 1000 students per semester, then use cheap glue so that they they can’t resell copies.

• you could always put together a short video clip for it, and put it on youtube.

• It goes without saying that you should send out a press release and distribute promotional copies to be reviewed.

• What book publishers generally do is send the author out on a speaking/book-signing tour. This, however, is done in cooperation with the bookstores that are selling the book, and for your own reasons you have stated that you will not be selling through bookstores. You could possibly do a book tour going to libraries.

• I recommend that you also consider adding video content to your site, especially if you choose not to do a book tour of any kind. I will explain-You can stage one local speaking/book-signing event, and videotape it, and place it on the site, gaining some of the benefits of a book tour. This will let people know the author on a more personal level, and will be pretty rich and compelling content for the site. You don’t have to worry about hosting the video content. Just load it to YouTube and embed the YouTube clip on your site.

• You could also consider doing a straight video promotional to place on YouTube as well. Have a look at this book promotional video for Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xAA71Ssids

• Sell an eBook edition- See: www.ebookmall.com

• JOIN THE CONVERSATION:
  Search the internet to find websites with Bulletin Board Forums on subjects that have a relationship to your book and post about the book there, obviously with a link to your site.

• Goto websites that have influential opinions on books, and a lot of traffic, like the New York Times, and post comments to their blog where it may be relevant to mention your book.

• http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/

• This also gives you things to blog about. Post comments on these sites that link to your site, then go back to your site and blog about having joined a conversation about your book on the other site and link to it. This not only generates traffic, but the circular links will push your site’s ranking way way up on search engine results.
  Seth Godin’s book, “Small is the new Big” could also be a good source for ideas for how to promote your book.

• Visit some marketing blogs, as well. They’re great for these kind of ideas. One of the blog has a list of links down the right column including 34 links under the sub-title “New Media, Marketing & Trend Spotting”-
  http://GigantiCo.squarespace.com/

• Create an eBook and sell online.

• Create a low cost PR stunt, perhaps use Google earth to track the breadth of downloads globally.

• Create an online book club using twitter/skype with a “speak to the author online” meeting.

• Be the first online novel to provide digitally signed copies to anyone who emails you?

• Create an “open” review site for your novel and perhaps seek ideas for your next novel?

• Try and get the novel translated “Free of charge” into many languages by using the online community.

• Ask the web what would they do now with the book characters to involve he reader participation and generate interest

• Create the personalties of characters online on Second Life and initiate communication there

• Follow it up with a ficitous blog from the charaters to say how they are getting on today, with references throughout the blog entries to events in the book

• Maybe even record 30 sec videos of book characters or a powerpoint slide show with slug lines or just two lead characters talking into camera and upload to youtube, with a link to the book at the end of the clip.

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